More Breaking News from Downtown Kansas City

My favorite film of all time is "It's a Wonderful Life." I know this is a cheesy pick for somebody as cynical, heartless, mean, gully and Latino as myself but I've always enjoyed laughing at white people's pain. Additionally, it's a pretty hardcore movie as far as X-mas films go. The movie starts off with the main character wanting to commit suicide. Then he gets his angsty, teenage, goth-like wish that he was never born and some crazy shit starts to go down.

The old whore he used to lust after becomes an even bigger whore, his wife becomes an "old maid" (single woman over 24) and he subsequently tries to rape her. Finally, he gets to feel what it's like to be a minority as a cop fires a shot at him in the middle of the street for no good reason. The money line in the surprisingly cynical film is spoken when George Bailey comes home to his loving family and says: "Why do we have to have all these kids?"

During one of the slower moments of the movie, right before my main man George rips the clothes off his sweetheart and sexually harasses her while her naked ass is out in the bushes African style, the couple is throwing rocks at a dilapidated house.

Contest: First person to name the house in the comments section gets a big fat link tomorrow.

Anyway, they throw a rock, break some glass and make a wish. Turns out that the homeless bums and other vagrants in KC are also breaking lots of windows in the equally dilapidated and nearly impassable downtown area. We all know that after 5 downtown is (and always will be) a ghost town and there isn't anybody to stop the vandalism and while I don't condone any kind of criminal activity I've heard that there is a KC connection to breaking windows downtown and the classic X-mas film. In the movie, it was good luck to shatter glass and in KC I hear that Mary Sanchez, Steve Penn, Louis Duguid, Rhonda Chris Lokeman and all of the other affirmative action writers all shed a tear when a window at the new Star building turns up broken.

So, while costly acts of vandalism downtown are ultimately unproductive it's clear that they've created a stir at our local print monopoly and caused them to at least recognize one consequence of downtown "development" that emptied the area of any neighbors and has obviously left the remaining bums and vandals feeling lonely, angry and ready to lash out.